1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to disk management technology and more particularly, to a high-efficiency virtual disk management system, which enables physical and virtual space address translation to be done at a time, improving virtual disk access performance and, which enables block-level storage media to realize the dynamic space allocation of virtual disks. It also naturally supports that multiple servers concurrently access to multiple virtual disks in the storage media without employing any additional lock scheme or server clustering mechanism.
2. Description of the Related Art
U.S. Pat. No. 7,107,385B2 discloses a storage virtualization selection technique, entitled “STORAGE VIRTUALIZATION BY LAYERING VIRTUAL DISK OBJECTS ON A FILE SYSTEM”, which “automates” a virtualization selection process to “layer” (create) virtual disk (vdisk) storage objects over a volume of a file system implemented by a storage operating system of a storage system, such as a multi-protocol storage appliance.
Taiwan Patent 1307026 discloses a storage management system and method, which uses a file system server, a Metadata server and an object storage device to achieve file access to virtual partitions. The Metadata server saves file management and index data. The object storage device stores and fetches file content data. As the file management and index data and the real file content data are separately stored in two different servers, increasing the storage units of the object storage device causes dynamic growth of the space of the virtual partitions.
The aforesaid prior art storage virtualization techniques are commonly adapted for flexibilizing physical disk space and virtual disk space by means of the file system management ability of the operating system or separation of file management index data from physical file content. However, these techniques commonly require a certain extent of extra computing consumption, i.e., it requires at least two layers of address translation to access to a file, lowering the performance of virtual disk access. As a result, they may be inapplicable to applications that require high speed disk access.